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the Kill ’Em All tour in our camper. We were listening to Peter Gabriel, too. So there were all these other things that…great, I mean, Witchfinder General Death Penalty all the way, but now we’ve listened to that twice we’re going to listen to something else. So very quickly on, for us, it started getting much wider in its musical scope, and obviously the things that were inspiring us were the things that we wanted to try and fuck with, to try and explore.’ With Cliff Burton now in charge of the in-car entertainment most days, they would have little choice. ‘When Cliff came along and Kirk came along, there was such a whole other level of musical schooling there, whole other levels of inspirations. I mean, listen, of course I knew who ZZ Top were but I’d never really heard ZZ Top. So Cliff is sitting there playing fucking ZZ Top, he’s playing Yes. Cliff is the one that brought The Misfits to us, do you know what I mean? There was this whole other world of stuff that was not on my radar. All of a sudden it was just like, fuck, yeah, I love Angel Witch, and I’ll play my Diamond Head records till the cows come home but, you know…I remember, like, Cliff sitting there listening to that 90125 record [by Yes] and it was like, “That’s really good.”’

On those rare nights when the band was actually booked into a small motel, James and Lars would share one room, Cliff and Kirk the other. Thus the none-too-subtle hierarchical delineations between band members were established and maintained, even then. But this had a positive benefit: ‘Cliff and I were bunkies,’ Kirk Hammett would later explain to me. ‘We were literally, in the first few years of the band, living in each other’s back pockets. I mean, we were very close.’ Late at night, after a show, ‘I would get my guitar out, he would get his guitar out, ’cos he really didn’t play bass that much away from the stage, he was always playing guitar. And we would just jam. We would play all sorts of stuff. We would listen to music together. We had similar interests. He was way into horror movies and H.P. Lovecraft, as I was. We were coming from the same place. He enjoyed doing hallucinogenics, and so did I. He would take acid and tell me, “Hey, man, I just took some acid, whatever you do don’t tell the other guys.” I would say, “Sure, man. Mum’s the word.” Because he knew that I didn’t like to take acid in any sort of like working environment, but it never bothered him.’

Cliff would trip while he was playing with the band onstage?

‘Oh, yeah, totally – and often, too. Mushrooms, acid – the whole deal. You also have to understand though, too, you know, on an emotional level, Cliff was a lot older…Not like a lot older [but] older, and it was a big difference. I mean, we all tended to look up to him ’cos he was the guy with the most life experience. He was always the one who exuded the most confidence, you know, he was the guy who was the most grounded as well – the guy who had the best sense of ethics and morals. Whereas we were like slash and burn, seek and destroy, he would like take a step back first and think about things and then slash and burn, seek and destroy. This was the guy who would sit around and listen to the Eagles and the Velvet Underground. He turned us onto R.E.M., he turned us onto Creedence [Clearwater Revival]. And he also loved Lynyrd Skynyrd, too – and nowadays it’s the thing. Cliff Burton was ahead of his time in more ways than one.’

There was a short break at the end of the tour – but only long enough to prepare for more coast-to-coast dates that would take them up to Christmas, this time as headliners in their own right. They didn’t wait for Christmas to start the party, either. ‘We would drink day in and day out and hardly come up for air,’ Kirk later recalled in Playboy. ‘People would be dropping like flies all around us, but we had the tolerance built up. Our reputation started to precede us. I can’t remember the [1983] tour – we used to start drinking at three or four in the afternoon.’ James: ‘We smashed dressing rooms just because you were supposed to. Then